Intrinsity

Intrinsity

Formerly	EVSX
Company type	Private
Industry	Semiconductors
Founded	1997(1997)inAustin, Texas,United States
Defunct	April 2010(2010-04)
Fate	Acquired byApple Inc.
Headquarters	Austin , United States
Website	www.intrinsity.com

Intrinsitywas a privately heldAustin, Texasbasedfabless semiconductor company;it was founded in 1997 asEVSXon the remnants ofExponential Technologyand changed its name to Intrinsity in 2000. It had around 100 employees and supplied tools and services for highly efficientsemiconductorlogicdesign, enabling high performancemicroprocessorswith fewertransistorsand low power consumption. The acquisition of the firm byApple Inc.was confirmed on April 27, 2010.

Products

Intrinsity's main selling point was its Fast14 technology, a set of design tools implemented in customEDAsoftware, for usingdynamic logicand novel signal encodings to permit greater processor speeds in a given process than naive static design can offer.

Concepts used in Fast14 are described in a white paper:and include the use of multi-phase clocks so that synchronisation is not required at every cycle boundary (that is, a pipelined design does not require latches at every clock cycle);1-of-Nencoding where a signal with N states is carried as a voltage on one of N wires with the other N-1 grounded, rather than being carried on log(N) wires which can be in arbitrary states; and a variety of sophisticated routing algorithms including ones which permute the order of the wires in a bundle carrying a 1-of-N signal in such a way as to reduce noise exposure, and ones which allow complicated gates to 'borrow' delay from simple ones to allow a shorter clock cycle than a more pessimistic design approach permits. Converters between the two signal encodings are readily available, and are useful for interfacing to blocks of static logic.

This technology has been used to implementARM,MIPS andPower ISAcores, which Intrinsity licences under the name ofFastCores;the first implementation wasFastMATH,aMIPS-basedDSP-like microprocessor implemented in 130 nm technology and introduced in 2002.It operates at 15 W power at 2.0 GHz and 1 V, and 6 W power at 1 GHz and 0.85 V; it was awarded Best Extreme Processor in 2003 byMicroprocessor Report.The design took 16 months by a team of 45 engineers.

In July 2009, Intrinsity announced that it had developed in collaboration with Samsung a 1 GHz implementation of the ARM Cortex-A8 chip;it had developed a similar high-speed implementation of the Cortex-R4 chip two years earlier.

Customers

• ATI– for reducing transistor count inGPUs.
• AMCC– forPower ISAbased designs reaching 3 GHz.
• LSI Corporation(thenAgere Systems) – for high performance and low powermacrocelldesign.
• Samsung- for high-speed, low power processor cores.

External links

• Intrinsity Turns a Corner – Microprocessor Report
• EVSX Announces Name Change and Technology Focus. – Business Wire
• Apple Buys a Chip Maker Behind the iPad Brain
• Working link to Fast14_Overview.pdf which disappeared from the Internet Archive